Page 54 of Obey

But Saraya...

She’d been out in the street. Not in the street, exactly, but crouched behind a car waiting for me. She hadn’t had anything to block an explosion of that sort.

She’d been nearly as exposed as I was, when it came right down to it.

And she wasn’t here, celebrating me being awake and alive. Everyone else was here, but Saraya...

“Saraya?” I wheezed, my voice scratchy and breathless, my lungs burning with the effort to talk.

My friends stopped talking and stared at me, their faces full of something I couldn’t quite read.

CHAPTER 25

KNIGHT

I WAS PANICKED. BETWEEN the weird way I woke up, the injuries, and the fact that I still couldn’t quite put all the pieces together, added to the hospital—where I obviously was—and all my injuries, I felt off-balance and vulnerable.

I wasn’t too proud to admit that I was scared out of my mind.

And add to that the fact that I was surrounded by some of my closest friends, people I considered family, but that Saraya wasn’t here...

Yes, ‘panicked’ was the only way to describe it.

I sat straight up in bed and looked quickly around the room, asking again and again for my girl and trying to figure out where the hell she could be. Had she been killed in that blast? Or taken back by Devil and his crew? Had Devil somehow survived what he’d done and kidnapped her again?

Was she, right this very moment, being tortured for escaping him again?

The thought was like a knife right into my heart and I screamed, terrified that I was losing her again.

It was the only thing that made sense, though. Why else would my friends be refusing to tell me where she was? If she was safe—even if she was hurt and in this very hospital, in the next room—surely they would have said so. Instead, they were reaching for me and grasping my uninjured shoulder, trying to push me back down on the bed. They were saying I was fine and that I’d be okay, that I was safe now.

They weren’t saying a single thing that sounded like, “Saraya is here too.”

To make everything even worse, the doctor was shouting out the door in an entirely different language, adding to the noise and confusion of the scene. The fact that I couldn’t understand him—that I didn’t know what he was telling someone else to do—freaked me out even more, and my struggles increased in intensity. I was flat-out fighting Remy to be allowed out of bed, now, desperate to get up and find Saraya. I reached down and yanked the IV out of my arm, hissing at the sting but knowing I couldn’t go anywhere while I was attached to it. I ripped off the round stickers that connected the beeping machine to me and swung my legs around and out of bed.

The pain was the thing that finally stopped me. I’d had broken bones before and knew how they felt, but I had never been burned the way I was right now. All the sudden movements were far too much for the tender skin and I hissed, feeling like every inch of skin was being torn off my body. I froze for a moment, trying to gain control over the pain, but it kept going.

And going.

And going.

And though I’d always thought I had a very high pain tolerance, this was too much. I fell back into bed, gasping and very near to tears at the nerves raging in my body. What was going on? Was this normal for burn victims? Or was there something else wrong—something they hadn’t told me about yet?

Fuck, was I dying?

And where was Saraya?

“What the hell is going on in here?” a voice I recognized said suddenly from the doorway.

Everyone in the room froze and silence fell suddenly, like someone had just turned off the audio switch. My eyes flew to the door, searching, and there...

There she was. Shining black curls and glowing green eyes, her face clean and healthy, her arms full of snacks. Her gaze shot around the room, concerned, and then turned to me... and went from concerned to a cross between relieved and very, very judgmental.

“You’re awake,” she gasped. She dropped everything in her arms and flew to me, throwing herself on me and wrapping her arms around my neck.

I grunted in pain, my skin igniting with flames once again, but didn’t move her. I was too overwhelmed with relief. And love, affection, and surprise. Saraya. My Saraya was alive and well.

She’d just stepped out to get snacks for everyone else, who had probably been so busy watching over me that they’d forgotten to eat. Because that was just who she was.